64291161
submission
StartsWithABang writes:
Tonight marks the third-and-final Supermoon of the year, but the physics governing the Moon will be no less super or spectacular all year long. Next month, a total lunar eclipse awaits us, while lunar libration allows us to see up to 59% of the Moon's surface over the course of the month, not a mere 50% like you might expect. What's the physics (and astronomy) governing the Moon? Summer Ash has the entire, comprehensive story.
64262723
submission
StartsWithABang writes:
Hydroelectric dams are one of the best and oldest sources of green, renewable energy, but — as the Three Gorges Dam in China exemplifies — they often cause a host of environmental and ecological problems and challenges. One of the more interesting ones is how to coax fish upstream in the face of these herculean walls that can often span more than 500 feet in height. While fish ladders might be a solution for some of the smaller dams, they're limited in application and success. Could Whooshh Innovations' Salmon Cannon, a pneumatic tube capable of launching fish up-and-over these dams, finally restore the Columbia River salmon to their original habitats?
64188257
submission
StartsWithABang writes:
Now that dark energy is firmly in place as the dominant source of energy in the Universe, the race is on to figure out exactly what its properties are, and what that will mean for the Universe's fate. If it's truly a cosmological constant, we're in for a Big Freeze, as galaxies expand away from one another faster and faster, leaving only our gravitationally-bound local group behind. But if dark energy changes over time, we might yet see a Big Crunch or the most horrifying of all fates: a Big Rip, where galaxy-by-galaxy, star-by-star and eventually atom-by-atom, everything is torn apart!
64161529
submission
StartsWithABang writes:
When you think of the most recognizable collections of stars: the Big Dipper, Cassiopeia, the “Teapot” in Sagittarius and the Southern Cross, they might have prominent stars, but none of them crack the top 10 in terms of brightness. Who, then, are the brightest stars in the sky? Come see how many you know, and find what makes them shine so brightly, and why they're not representative of most stars in the Universe!
64150007
submission
StartsWithABang writes:
Convinced that the risks of nuclear power are too great for the world? That air travel is unsafe? That GMOs are poisoning our world and our bodies? That fluoridated drinking water causes long-term harm? That climate change isn't a manmade thing? Or that vaccines cause more harm than good? Unless you're willing to drop your ideology and completely cast it aside, you'll never accept what science says about these issues, and therefore you're preventing us all from making a better world. Cut it out!
64063955
submission
StartsWithABang writes:
When you think about the stars in the sky, it takes some study to realize that the bluest, brightest stars are also the shortest lived. So when we look at a cluster of stars — or any stellar population — we can figure out how old it is by looking at the color and magnitude of the brightest, bluest main-sequence stars that are still alive. In general, the oldest objects are the reddest globular clusters, which formed when the Universe was only a few hundred million years old. Because the Universe was mostly hydrogen and helium at the time, enriched by relatively few generations of stars, these clusters tend to have very small amounts of heavy elements like iron, sometimes as little as 1% of what’s in our Sun. So when a star cluster has a color/magnitude diagram that says it's very old but a heavy element abundance that says it's relatively young, who wins? We all do, by learning more about how, when and where atomic riches accumulate in galaxies!
64004091
submission
StartsWithABang writes:
Although dark energy has always been present in the Universe, it didn't come to dominate the Universe's energy content until recently. But even before that, its effects on the Universe's expansion rate could be felt, and it caused distant galaxies to begin accelerating away from us. Thanks to the precision measurements that have come out since the Planck satellite, we're now able — for the first time — to pinpoint with tremendous accuracy exactly when the Universe transitioned from a decelerating to an accelerating state. Come have your misconceptions about dark energy and cosmic acceleration cleared up here. (And no, the expansion rate itself isn't increasing; it's still going down!)
63974371
submission
StartsWithABang writes:
Labor Day is this coming Monday, and that means the new school year is about to start. Whether you are or whether you know a young person, say in middle-or-high school, you’re likely very close to someone facing a lot of uncertainty about not only their future, but about their present. Who can be expected to know exactly what they want to do and exactly how to get the most out of it when they’re only a teenager? Yet that’s what we expect most students to do. For students that are interested in STEM — science, technology, education and mathematics — the pressure is even greater. So what advice should you give them? Here’s a great start, from someone who’s been there and who’s helped a generation of kids go through it!
63956433
submission
StartsWithABang writes:
When you look out into the Universe at distant galaxies, at clusters of galaxies or at the Universe on the largest scales, what you see is the luminous stuff, which is pretty exclusively stars and stellar-related objects. But based on what we know about gravitation on those scales, we know there’s got to be much more mass than that, most of which doesn’t emit light: dark matter. It seems like a great leap to presume that there’s a new type of matter out there accounting for these observations. Could normal, non-luminous matter possibly account for all the dark matter? No, and here’s why it can't!
63904885
submission
StartsWithABang writes:
You've no doubt heard of dark matter halos around galaxies: vast, extended, spherical collection of mass that reach for hundreds of thousands of light-years beyond what we typically think of as a spiral or elliptical galaxy. But did you know that galaxies contain vast, extended stellar halos as well? Moreover, they look nothing like you'd expect! They're not spherical or even ellipsoidal, but highly irregular, and have an awful lot to teach us about how galaxies came to be the way they are today.
63902381
submission
Luminary Crush writes:
Most of the detected exoplanets thus far have been gas giants which aren't great candidates for life as we know it. However, many of those planets are in fact in the star's habitable zone and could have moons with conditions more favorable. Until now, methods to detect the moons of such gas giants have been elusive, but researchers at the University of Texas, Arlington have discovered a way to detect the interaction of a moon's ionosphere with the parent gas giant from studies of Jupiter's moon Io. The search for 'Pandora' has begun.
63901557
submission
mpicpp writes:
Customers must pay more if they exceed limits—but it’s not a cap, Comcast says.
For the past couple of years, Comcast has been trying to convince journalists and the general public that it doesn’t impose any “data caps” on its Internet service.
That’s despite the fact that Comcast in some cities enforces limits on the amount of data customers can use and issues financial penalties for using more than the allotment. Comcast has said this type of billing will probably roll out to its entire national footprint within five years, perhaps alongside a pricier option to buy unlimited data.
“There isn't a cap anymore. We're out of the cap business,” Executive Vice President David Cohen said in May 2012 after dropping a policy that could cut off people's service after they use 250GB in a month. Comcast's then-new approach was touted to "effectively offer unlimited usage of our services because customers will have the ability to buy as much data as they want."
63899339
submission
StartsWithABang writes:
If you’ve ever heard someone dismiss evolution, the Big Bang or climate change as “just a theory” and wanted to pull your hair out, you’re not alone. In science, after all, theories are the most powerful ideas we have to explain the mechanism behind the most intricate observable phenomena in the Universe. But it’s where our theories fail, or at the fringes, where observations-or-experiments might disagree with the best theoretical predictions, that progress is made. This tantalizing border between the known-and-understood and the next undiscovered frontier are something we only cross by challenging our most cherished assumptions. Here are some of our most sacred fundamental assumptions, and how we're probing them for the next great leap forward!
63825653
submission
StartsWithABang writes:
It's a beautiful idea, the notion that the Earth isn't simply affected by the Sun and the Moon, but by the locations and positions of our planet relative to the others in our Solar System and to the stars as well. But there are many beautiful ideas that don't describe reality; those fall squarely into the category of pseudoscience. So what's the deal with astrology? How does it stand up to scientific scrutiny, and can we truly say that it's wrong, or only that there's not yet an observed significance to it?
63760247
submission
StartsWithABang writes:
It’s the holy grail of modern particle physics: discovering the first smoking-gun, direct evidence for physics beyond the Standard Model. Sure, there are unanswered questions and unsolved puzzles, ranging from dark matter to the hierarchy problem to the strong-CP problem, but there’s no experimental result clubbing us over the head that can’t be explained with standard particle physics. That is, the physics of the Standard Model in the framework of quantum field theory. Or is there? Take a look at the evidence from the muon’s magnetic moment, and see what might be the future of physics!
